Direct design from input/output data of a fault‐tolerant control system based on GIMC structure

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AbstractThis paper deals with a method for the design of a fault‐tolerant control system based on the Generalized Internal Model Control (GIMC) structure, consisting of a standard outer loop feedback controller and an extra inner loop controller. The distinguishing feature of the GIMC structure is that controller design for performance and robustness may be performed separately. The outer loop controller is designed for nominal performance using some controller synthesis to meet the (nominal) control specification, while the inner loop controller is designed to make a trade‐off between robustness and performance. This feature is suitable for fault‐tolerant control. The outer loop controller is designed for the fault‐free case, and the inner loop controller for the fault‐time case. In the conventional methods, the inner loop controller is designed to maximize the robust stability margin without fault information. Therefore, the performance in the fault‐time case tends to become conservative. In this paper, the inner loop controller is directly designed from experimental data collected from the faulty system. Since the collected data contains information on the fault, conservativeness in the conventional methods is decreased. The inner loop controller is designed by Virtual Reference Feedback Timing (VRFT). VRFT is a method of direct design from input‐output data without identifying any models. Since the complexity of the controller can be specified by the designer, no complexity reduction is necessarily required, which is advantageous in implementation. The effectiveness of the proposed design method is confirmed by an experiment. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 171(4): 53–62, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20929